As document content becomes increasingly available over wide area networks such as the Internet, indexing and categorizing this content for efficient search becomes more of a challenge for organizations that post content on, for example, web pages. This challenge is likely to become more of an issue as more organizations make information available via electronically searchable databases.
Another challenge with enabling users to electronically search for content is supporting searches for synonyms. Under some approaches, a search engine might receive a given input keyword search, and expand the keywords by identifying synonyms for the keywords at the time that the search is requested. Afterwards, the search engine may perform individual keyword searches for each identified synonym.
While the foregoing approaches may work suitably in some circumstances, there are nevertheless opportunities for improvement, as described further in this application.